wildcat

Awkward coffeehouse moment: "Can I. Take your. Order?" The robot -- an elongated egg-shape with a speaker in the front and six pincer-arms -- hovered in front of Gordon in line, having just finished polling the guy in the turban and pin-striped suit on his order. Gordon gawped. "Can I. Take your. Order?" The robot sounded like a talk-show host with all the personality drained away, the rough timbre of the voice reduced to scraps of pre-recorded bits pasted together.

"I'm not here for a coffee," said Gordon awkwardly. The woman in the violet jumpsuit directly behind him in line tapped her foot and checked the time on her phone.

"We have. Many. Other. Options. Besides. Coffee."

"No, no, I mean. I'm just here to drop off my resumé." He held up a square of white paper with all his vitals on it, safely laminated from stains. People up ahead finished paying for their drinks and moved off to the side, allowing the line to move up. The woman in the jumpsuit kicked Gordon's ankle and he shuffled forward. "Is the manager around?"

The robot regarded the paper for a moment, apparently processing. "Recycling. Facilities. are located. With the. Cream/Sugar/Other." One of the long pincer-arms indicated a station over by the door. "Thank you. For your. Concern. With. Regard. To the. Environment." The word environment barely squeezed out of the speaker sounding at all like English.

"No, I want to drop this off in case you're looking for people." Gordon held out the resumé for the robot to take. The woman in the jumpsuit clucked loudly and people behind her scraped their foam shoes against the floor, shifting their weight, and started to mutter to each other. This was seriously devaluing their coffeehouse experience.

"This unit. Is not. Authorized. To take. Your list. Of demands. All terrorist. Situations. Should be directed. To the. Senior Director. Of marketing. Or the. Manager."

"What? I'm not trying--"

"Trying. Something. New? I recommend. Our dark. Roast!"

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

The problem was, eventually they ran out of billionaire daredevils and photogenic rocket scientists. They were all up there in the sky: exploring alien planets and building nebula-cities. Giving birth to beautiful angel-babies in zero gravity and forming colonies of sky-poets.

Earth, well, Earth was just there -- the "Compost Heap," some people called it, few years after the first Rapture of Scientists. Sure, they'd send data back to Earth -- new technologies and letters to their left behind family -- but they never came back. Robots did most of the thinking, building, servicing -- they were also in charge of firing up boatloads of candidates when they made themselves known, fresh thinkers and space-heroes.

The general public, they mostly wandered. Looked up at the sky a lot -- more than they used to, probably, though nobody bothered to do formal studies.

Gerald did that -- he stood out on fire escape, gripped the black iron railing, and looked up. Vanna was inside, dancing around to a Dizzie Gillespie record she found at the pawn shop. It was too loud, hard for Gerald to think out there with Dizzie on one side and the city honking at him on the other. Road rage increased as the number of earthbound scientists decreased. Again, nobody did a study. Gerald rubbed at his forehead and tried to spot Venus in the sky, but he was never very good at telling the planets apart from the stars. He wanted to shout at Vanna to turn down the music but that would start another argument and he didn't really need to deal with that. They fought too often these days, over stupid things, and his hands ached from the constant clenching. Same with his jaw.

A jetcar swept around and into the alleyway alongside their building, screeching forth at a ninety degree angle. "Daredevil behaviour," Gerald mumbled, leaning forward to catch sight of the driver. "They're either going to beat that out of you, kid, or fire you into space." No chance of that happening to Gerald -- he looked both ways before crossing and tossed the milk the night before it expired. Always. To do otherwise carried too many risks, and he expected he'd be eaten by a Martian the second he went up there.

There was a wild screech of metal on brick at the other end of the alley, the whomp of gravity engines cycling, sirens and people shouting. Definitely a space-case.

"Honey," said Vanna as she poked through the window, offering a can of Winged Snake. "Beer?" They could spend three hours every night screaming at each other about the cracked plaster over the sink but she could still sound like that and offer him a beer. He scratched at the back of his neck and just smiled, holding out his hand. "Thought you needed one."

Gerald popped the tab and took a long, rough pull. "Awful thoughtful of you, baby." He could ignore the Dizzie for a little while longer, with her looking like that, pulling herself out the window in a yellow sundress that hugged just so. Just so. Gerald tilted back to take another sip and caught sight of the waning sun. Beer was a little warm but they'd been having troubles with the fridge.

Vanna exhaled loudly and fought with her long brown hair, dragging it back behind her ears. "I'm going to get it cut." She pulled it right back, held the dangling mass out of sight, and then pouted like he was her mirror. "Right off."

"That would be. Different." Gerald took another sip. He liked the long hair but if he said that outright it would be another long fight and they were running out of plates and Vanna had a habit of tossing his underwear and socks off the fire escape into the dumpster below.

"Actually, we need to talk."

"About?"

"I've signed up for a base-jumping class and I'm thinking about skydiving."

He crushed the can right then, the last sip's worth sputtering out to drip from the rails. He tossed it over his shoulder without taking his eyes off her. "You're taking a base-jumping class," he said, drawing out the syllables like he was trying and failing to work through a math problem. The robots, as a rule, filed his taxes for him. "You're. You're taking a base-jumping class?"

Vanna crossed her arms and leaned back against the cracked brick. "Yes. I've been feeling." She put her head back. Staring up. "Stuck. Earthbound. Bored. You know." You know, you know, they'd all seen the psych profile by now. There was a certain type of ennui associated with this condition.

Gerald wanted to say, don't leave me. He wanted to say, I'll change. Instead, he found himself twisting around to stare down at the dumpster and his mouth opening with other words coming out: "Could you turn down the bloody music already? I have a headache."

And somewhere, they fired a rocket from atop the tallest mountain...

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

Freedom was unexpected and came with an unusual flavour. Andy-Grigori Warhol-Rasputin 9 leaned against the rooftop's safety-bar and breathed. The air tasted of iron and lemon vodka. His jailer -- well, his jailer until now -- stood to his left, arms folded across her naked copper chest. Galatea gave no indication of fatigue or boredom, had none of the thousand human tics that made up body language, except when she chose to. Andy-Grigori felt no need to humour her humanistic behaviours and she felt no need to mimic them for his benefit. A rarity, this honest relationship between man and machine. Andy-Grigori clucked his tongue and found himself missing the simple repetition of the Marilyn Monrobots, who were packed away for display in one of the future's strange museums. Or so Galatea had explained.

"They wanted you to be placed in an deep-culture tank," she said. Her eyes hummed and clicked, emitting purple light. Recording, recording. For posterity. If there was ever to be a woman he'd marry, well, this was her. Even if she wasn't a woman. But that was appropriate, of course. "Bendix and the Board. They're in the business of building geniuses and then tanking them for the greater benefit of society."

"But?"

Galatea laughed, which sounded nothing like a proper laugh in that it was so perfect. It reminded him of the fake laughter at the end of an old Star Trek episode, only he couldn't remember if he'd ever seen one. Imperfect replication of neural pathways. The city skyline was impossible and he wanted a Polaroid camera quite, quite badly. They stopped making them centuries ago, according to the data-banks. "But," she said. Sometimes she paused, he suspected, because people paused to collect their thoughts. "But there are other ways for geniuses to be useful to society. Anyway, everybody's a genius these days."

"I always expected robots to be perfectly logical and follow orders explicitly."

Another laugh. "One of the other Galateas went mad, you know. She killed off an entire planet and then wandered around in the ashen remains for a week and half before she was deactivated. Bit of diplomatic nightmare. We are imperfect beings, occasionally." She reached over and touched his elbow, like you might a relative or a mental patient. Both. He pulled at his long black beard. "Occasionally, the city needs a mad scientist or strange photographer to take up residence like a real person and make a few adjustments. A mad monk can be essential to urban development."

He smiled sidelong at her. "You'll be deactivated for this, I expect."

Galatea ran a finger over the silver straps running along his chest, and pulled out a soft woolen jacket. There were no sheep anywhere on Earth. Just electric ones. Battery-powered wool. "There's an old data module in the pocket. The Board were adamant that you not be fitted with a brain-receiver. They like their geniuses kept pure. I've outfitted it with the address of a woman I know, who's calling herself Eni these days. She's prone to getting drunk up on office buildings. She's from the Twenty-First Century."

"I thought about visiting my daughter, actually."

Galatea's face remained neutral, her hand running circles over his wrist. She wore the same expression Anastasia did on occasion. He could remember that quite clearly, though the image was a barely more than a cartoon. Memory cobbled together out of video files. "Maria Rasputin died centuries ago, Andy-Grigori." When had she started to call him by his first name, rather than Number Nine? "Go meet Eni. She needs a purpose. The city needs a change. I need a change." Galatea tilted her head. Incoming software update, probably. He didn't grasp all the particulars of how she...lived...but she had certain routines. "Step off the roof." She reached up and ran a finger over the left strap of his environment-harness and it hummed in time with her eyes. They switched to the orange light. "Step off the roof."

"I'd say goodbye, but I'll meet your sisters sooner or later, I imagine."

"Indeed."

What a strange thing, to step off a roof without worrying about death. But Andy-Grigori never worried about death, having been killed several times. He'd been bred with that in mind. He leapt off the roof like one might get out of a limousine. And gravity changed direction--

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

Things began to go strange when the first glass-skinned child was born in New Jersey, looking for all the world like a cathedral window -- giving off the soft music of a thousand chimes with each breath. There was blood everywhere, the mother died almost immediately of internal bleeding, and one of the nurses couldn't help the scream that slipped right now. The doctor would never be able to forgive himself, but the child was slick with fluid and still quite hot, he yelped. Her surface shattered on contact with hospital floor like so many champagne flutes dumped at a party, people talking and things broke. The mother's gasping death rattle. What was underneath the child's shattered skin lay splayed out in the wet; when the last pieces settled down there was a hard silence in the delivery room. They couldn't tell anybody about this, right? That horrible thought bubbled right up in all of them, there, and then came the memory -- now quite dim -- of the father, caught in traffic, rushing to be with his wife to welcome their little one. They couldn't tell anyone. Right? Right? No one could know, only -- and time seemed to move slowly, here -- someone produced a camera phone and something invisible about the world began to change shape.